Some notes

Our apologies for the dearth of new additions to the reader. Besides some huge events in our offline life, we're also debating over what to add exactly. There's the Manual for a Living Revolution, which is simply great, and some other stuff we're thinking about. There are also some readings from this project's first generation that might be scrapped. Our promise is that it'll all remain online, in case people have linked to it, but we'll no longer upgrade and it may not be on the central table of contents. Nonetheless, there have been some fairly invisible additions to the pages. For example, there are now about a million distinct quotes on the blog's right panel. I hope everyone's summer is going well.

p.s. Everyone seems to be whispering sweet nothings about Al Gore these days. Please do not forget what he did in South Africa on behalf of the pharmaceutical corporations vis-a-vis the AIDS pandemic. Not to be ultraleft, but Al Gore may be a mainstream politician who will loudly talk about the existence of global warming, but his environmental gestures should not be a feather in his cap and instead be seen as an indictment of the rest of the crooks. People seem like they're a little quick to pat the guy on the back for pointing out that the earth is, in fact, round.

p.p.s. The New York Times has been particularly egregious in its coverage of Israel's naked invasion of Lebanon. Buried in their article about Hezbollah's Secretary-General, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, there is one interesting paragraph (amid numerous ones denouncing him and dismissing him):

But Sheik Nasrallah is definitely in touch. He gloats over the evident confusion reflected in the Israeli news media about their military offensive. He is known to have read the autobiographies of Israel’s prime ministers. He always calls Israel “the Zionist entity,” maintaining that all Jewish immigrants should return to their countries of origin and that there should be one Palestine with equality for Muslims, Jews and Christians.

(Emphasis added) I don't know enough about Nasrallah to form a firm opinion, but why isn't this last point central to the debate? One side is a clear apartheid state while others want an egalitarian society; obviously there are some who are not anti-zionist, but anti-semitic and who should be included in the debate: they reveal the foolishness of zionism. I'm curious about what Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi is saying about all of this.